On the night of 13 February 1945, 805 RAF Lancaster bomber crews set out on what was, apparently, just another raid on a German city. For the loss of nine aircraft, Bomber Command dropped approximately 2600 tonnes of high explosive and incendiary bombs into the centre of Dresden, creating the firestorm that devastated it. The numbers of people killed are still disputed but the best evidence suggests that 25–35,000 died (only slightly fewer than at Nagasaki under the second atomic bomb). About 35 square kilometres of the city were completely destroyed and many more badly damaged.
The raid left us one of the most famous and powerful photographic images of the war. From high on the roof of the Town Hall, a blackened statue of a woman, her arms spread, appears ready to embrace in pity the skeletal remains of gutted buildings which run for block after block. It is a view of Sodom and Gomorrah after the cataclysm. One of the Lancaster pilots who had looked down in awe at the blazing city was Frank Smith, whose son Alan, nearly 60 years later, would play a significant role in Dresden’s resurrection.
Although it is crucial to emphasise here that I reject any suggestion of moral equivalence between the Allies’ destruction of Dresden and the Nazis’ genocidal campaign against the Jews, both were products of the insidious tendency in wartime for the previously unthinkable to become routine or even desirable. On 3 September 1939, when Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany in support of Poland, practically no one in either Britain or Germany had heard of Auschwitz. Most Europeans knew Dresden only as an architectural marvel, ‘Florence on the Elbe’. That both Auschwitz and Dresden would become and remain icons of the utmost horror was simply inconceivable in London and Berlin that early autumn day.
Even as he started a war he blamed on them, Hitler had no plans to murder the Jews of Europe. Yet in less than two years genocide had become a major, if highly secret, war aim of his. And when the RAF went to war in September 1939, it was ordered to confine its air raids to offshore naval targets because of the possibility of causing civilian casualties if land targets, even of a military nature, were attacked. While, in the light of what we know happened afterwards, this punctiliousness seems almost laughable, British policy at